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1972
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giovedì, ottobre 23, 2003
Il Gulag nordcoreano. Il rapporto. Come annunciato è stato presentato ieri il documento del U.S. Committee sul sistema concentrazionario in Corea del Nord. Qui trovate la relazione completa con le immagini dei campi e le testimonianze. Qui il comunicato stampa sul sito ufficiale del Comitato.
Il Gulag nordcoreano. Un orrore che il mondo non può continuare ad ignorare. Sul WSJ Claudia Rosett anticipava alcuni dei temi trattati nel dossier. Dall'articolo: Compiled by veteran human rights researcher David Hawk, who worked on documenting such events as the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s and Rwandan slaughter of the 1990s, this 120-page document provides the most thorough account yet of what Mr. Hawk described to me in a phone interview this week as an elaborate institution of grotesque abuse that even among the most terrible prison systems on the planet ranks as "the worst." The point here is not that everyone in the free world must master the intricacies and lexicon of the entire North Korean prison-camp system, but that we need to understand just how systematic, deliberate and cruel an institution it is--no accident of Kim's misrule, but a pillar of his totalitarian state, and of the much-discussed security of his regime. The structure has been faithfully inherited from Kim Jong Il's totalitarian father, Kim Il Sung, designed to routinely and utterly dehumanize, torment and destroy the inmates, while squeezing from them the kind of labor once favored in the Nazi or Soviet death camps. And the policy of starving prisoners, notes this report, "preceded, by decades, the severe nationwide food shortages experienced by North Korea in the 1990s." This report highlights two Korean phrases that define the two major tiers of Kim's prison-camp system, and deserve to be learned in the West, just as we once had to absorb the term gulag to understand the Soviet system. The first phrase is kwan-li-so, which translates as "political penal-labor colonies"--to which political offenders are sentenced for life, without recourse, sometimes with three generations of their families, without even the show of a trial, and sometimes without even knowing why they are there. There are six or seven of these kwan-li-so, huge sprawling enclaves from which almost no one ever returns, and in which, explains Mr. Hawk, "the most salient feature of day-to-day prison-labor camp life is the combination of below-subsistence food rations and extremely hard labor." The other phrase is kyo-hwa-so, which means "long-term prison-labor camps," to which both political offenders and common criminals are sentenced for specific terms, and where there is some pretense of "re-education through labor." But in these camps, recounts this report, "loss of life occurs at such high rates that many of the kyo-hwa-so are perceived by prisoners as death camps in that they expect to die before the completion of their sentences." Beyond that, there are the special detention centers--especially brutal--for North Koreans forcibly repatriated after trying to flee into China. |
A Fabio.
A Luisa.   
  Asia e dintorni Normblog |
